The new version of Glue Tools PhantomCine Toolkit, in this case, 3.1.2693, has Open CL GPU acceleration. Since converting Phantom Cine files to ProRes is a daily occurrence at Brain Farm, I thought I would do some speed tests. I got some interesting results.

During GPU mode, the processor never went above 300%, so I don’t believe that a newer, faster computer would make a difference in this test.

I have both a GTX570 and a GT120 in my test computer. They both showed up as options in the PhantomCine Preferences Pane, so I don’t believe that multiple GPUs would make the transcodes faster.

The reads/writes never got above 50MB/s, so storage speed was not a factor here.

Since this app uses Open CL and not CUDA, it would be interesting to add an ATI 5770 or 5870 to the test. Maybe I’ll dig my 5770 out of the closet.

Mac OS X 10.8.2 could be faster. I believe that the Open CL driver is a bit better, but not sure.

The Glue Tools plug-in is single threaded, so running a cluster for Compressor would not be faster.

If you’re running a non-Apple-approved nVidia card on OS X 10.7, then you need to do the “Open CL fix”. I found that it was difficult to know if the fix actually worked when I did it. Installing the demo version of Glue Tools allows you to see if it worked. The processing drop down list – CPU Processing or GPU Processing, only shows GPU cards that have Open CL. Before I applied the fix, the GTX570 did not appear in the list. After the fix, it does. I don’t believe you have to do this with OS X 10.8